My Etsy Shop

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Adventures in Selling My Work...

In 1969, a good friend, Jan, may she rock and roll in peace, taught me how to crochet...or at least, she tried to show me how to crochet...you see, I am left-handed, and she wasn't- and if you thought the Keystone Kops were a laff riot then you've never seen a rightie tryin' to teach a leftie anything...(that holds true in politics as well as which-handedness)
I finally bough an illustrated pamphlet on how to crochet -of course it was also for right-handers, but I had a plan, a technique learned from a fellow painter friend of mine, to use when trying to do portraits from photos.
Do you get that feeling of unease when you see your face in photos...the reason is because the person who prints them does so in a way that does not replicate what you see in a mirror, so somehow your face seems distorted in photos; if you draw the face from a mirror image of the photo, that is more likely to be familiar to the person whose portrait you are painting..so I took a mirror, held it at a 90 degree angle to the illustration, and drew what I saw...
Because the mirror image was 'backwards' it worked for me- and that was how I taught myself to crochet. Unfortunately, I never learned to follow a pattern, so must rely even today on making it up as I go along...

My friend Jan, who was a fabulous needlewoman in every particular (she even made the bobbin lace for her wedding dress) decided that after practicing awhile, we would make little purses and sell them to stores.
Of course, this was the time of macrame, crochet and other funky looks in fashion-the original hippy-boho, that every 20 year old today thinks she understands.. Our bags were simple long rectangles, folded with a half-flap and the sides crocheted together, with a crocheted button and loop closure and a very long strap.
Because Jan had once been a denizen of the wealthy Bel-Air-Westwood neighborhoods, she thought that if we went to those neighborhoods and sold them to trendy boutiques, which had just begun as a concept, that we would do well...

So we went off to Westwood, home of UCLA, and beautiful upscale shops to rival anything on Rodeo Drive...designers didn't have the power to control fashion then, and those with their own shops were using streetwear as their inspiration, just as they do now.
Of course, we were considered 'exotic', as fully-functional hippies in a decidedly non-hippy neighborhood, so we actually sold a few bags in a few shops, rendering us way too optomistic about our futures as independent businesswomen.
The next time we ventured out with our samples, we were told by a shop who had sold all our bags that they were getting them made by someone else at a better price...well, we certainly didn't have a copyright or even a business license, so not much we could do..but since shopowners talk to other shopowners, we quickly learned that this woman had offered our designs wholesale to the other shops we had sold to at a better price than we could...ergo, no more sales...
That's the wholesale market for you...extremely cutthroat...we learned a painful lesson that day, and I decided, no more wholesale. I almost stuck with that promise to myself, too...

1 comment:

what a great story. I too have a friend Jan, who knits, and is still living in Michigan. We graduated fromhigh school in 1969, so we were a little young for the full-blown hippiedom, but we did our best in college. I left MI a long time ago, now I only visit. Thank you for the flag counter. Rock on!